Category: travel

palenque

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swimming in a pool in the rain
duck dive, a few powerful dolphin kicks, deep within and beneath the turquoise, channeling my inner ‘man from atlantis’
break the surface, air gulp, flip over onto back, lily pad float
the torrential rain pummels and pelts, pooling in eye sockets, cleansing, baptismal
ricocheting, with some force, off my third eye
lotus lotus, om mani padme om, jewell in the lotus lotus
i am part bing crosby, part one of those 1930’s synchronised swimmers… a solo synchronised swimmer?
curiously ungainly on land, in the water i am slee-eeek, creature of grace and flow
next, with a whoop, it’s up and down the water slide, a deceptive hurtle!!!
the waiter comes out to smile, i am the days only customer… earlier, camaraderie, both staring mournful aghast at the continual downpour
trees, awnings, almost everything drips and ripples, a constant kerplonk
mucho juvia… deluge
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yep hotel kin ha, palenque, halfway along the road to las ruinas
actually a motel, think whams club tropicana meets crossroads. i the love child twixt andrew ridgley and benny?
really like it here… a huge sprawling site, littered with concrete faux mayan sculptures, half the huts derelict, mildewed and overgrown, a solemn recognition that one day, one day soon, the jungle will take back everything
these weird baby hippo like creatures scurry by, i guess they are some sort of rodent on steroids? humming birds, as small as butterflies, supping at preposterous blowsy flowers,
parakeets ungainly flap overhead, a terrific screech
oh and howler monkeys, at sunset, their guttural growls competing with, blending into, the cacophony of mexican kids at the on site roller disco… not tonight tho, a different tenure of howl when soggy bedraggled
at tikal i saw toucans!!! TOUCANS!
rain days… days to pause and reflect… out of time, out of place, out of time, out of place… reflect on what? no blooming idea! which, with the soft subtle forgiveness of sunset, I guess, is completely as it should be
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oh and i’m guffawing my way through the audio version of ‘my family and other animals’, not my usual taste, must have read it, and loved it when i was 12… comfortable, soothing for the soul

Lakes and Sunsets

a tableau… 3 from Lago Atitlan (last week) and 2 from Flores this eve… no post complete without at least one selfie! X

boys jumping onto the dock… Part 1
boys jumping onto the dock… Part 2
waves of water, waves of land…. boat wake and volcanos
sun kissed boy
golden violet hour

My faves are the boys jumping onto the dock…. I’m not much of a photographer, always preferring to express in words, but occasionally you get a twitch of Cartier Bresson
Sunsets are the best time of day… I was sitting at the back of the boat waiting for it to take me home… A framing of dock with backdrop of volcano, boats arriving at a beautiful angle, the boys silhouetted by the light of the setting sun… Of course the photo I wanted never quite happened… One of them in mid air leaping
But hey ho, with my bewilderment of phone buttons, normally I manage to turn it off rather than taking a snap, so just be happy
One of the things I loved was the speedboat across the lake as a normal means of travel… Me whooping at every bump, the locals cheerfully non committal… Just going about their lives … Beauty so constant, it is worth neglecting, is to my mind a wonderful notion
Used to get a similar vibe on the top deck of the sunset bus home from work along the cliffs. Humdrum sumptuousness x

Tikal

Ruins and Jungle… Parrots, Spider Monkeys, Pisotes (a friendly, funky long nosed Racoon critter), err a psychedelic Turkey… And me… From atop the temples the canopy of trees reaches to the horizon
Tho on reflection, with my 7:00 am face I could be more ancient and stoney than any Mayan carving
34 years (tho only a small slither of a baktun) since I was but an hour away in Flores, yet never made it here… Always good to arrive, however tardy!

Rich P: Remarkable likeness.

I liked the likeness

Yes! Doppelganger for the legendary and benign late classic ruler ‘squinting manatee’

crash bang baswallop

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‘Crash Bang Baswallop’… Berlin 1990
graffitiing, juggling on … and helping to demolish Die Mauer
Tim, one of my best mates from uni, sent these photos of photos over the other week, I haven’t seen them since ooh 1990
the wall, obvs a dark, difficult scar in europes recent past… yet much in the turbulent, often joyful, spirit of those days, youthful hippies were allowed, nay encouraged, to clamber all over history… with hammers… astonishing
changed the direction of my life too… within a week i’d hitched down to prague for the first time… and was living and squatting there for much of the next 3 years… hectic but beautiful times! x

young one one

feels so near i can almost taste it, yet somehow, almost exactly, half a life time ago!… what does become of our younger selves… the river of time and all that malarkey
… edit… adding brief words, belatedly, to what is but a supremely lazy ‘memories of yesteryear’ repost…….
curious as to the provenance of this snap… i remember that we were in a pub car park, somewhere in surrey… with mum and dad, hence the dreads scraped back out of sight, suspect mel would have taken it
summer early 90’s… i’m either just back from prague or the caves in granada… or possibly even south america, but don’t think it’s that late time wise
not one of my pics, as i didn’t take a single one till the kids were born, old photos are somewhat skimpy on the ground
ah what became of that carefree fellow?… guess the young are seldom carefree… just my concerns would have been along the lines of ‘where am i sleeping tonight, wheres the next party!’
oops, it’s become a maudlin’ morning now… i’m shocked my socks match… thats what happens when you dress soberly to please the fogies
and more importantly what became of those groovy deckchair shorts… missing them sommat grevious! x

cheese

Say ‘cheese’, say ‘squee-ee-ze’… India partakes in its daily attempt to set a new world record for number of sentient beings in a confined space (ala 1970s Blue Peter phone boxes and minis!)… this time as we wend our way around hair pin bends, tumbling down through the Tamil Nadu foothills of the Western Ghats (think Alp sized mountains, without the cable cars, neglected due to continental proximity to the humongous himalayas)… on every bend, there is a collective flabbergasted ‘oof’ of crushed torsos, overlaid with the higher trill of women’s voices… I one of the the lucky ones… with a seat, through dint of having been stuck on the bus, forever, since it and seemingly times beginning… India has a knack of making you feel like a speck amongst a billion, whisper it, soto voce, Kerala and most of the western states, do not have the sense of the high tempo madness… the numinous of the Nadu…. for all the senses the dial turned to 11… ego bamboozled midst a soup of sensation… pounding bollywood tunes, pong of armpits, a bird of paradise blur of colourful saris
a day of contrasts: dawn amongst the tea plantations of munnar, awash with myriad green… watching the malabar giant black squirrels somersault amongst the top of the highest trees… fighting off the equally black crows… truly giants, the size of a monkey, kali black with the fiercest of red trimmings!… a loooong bus journey, 6 hours when it should have been 3… to end guzlling masala dosa, lawks the flavours, just outside the majestic gopurams (gateways) of the Sri Meenakesh temple in Madurai…. proper cream crackered. g’night, snooze good x